TPL On The Road： Royal Star Foods ft Francis Morrissey
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Toxicity
1
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Hate speech
3
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Summary
Francis Morrissey is the CEO of Royal Star Fisheries Foods, a company that processes millions of pounds of lobster every year. The company is based in Tignish, P.E.I. and is a major employer on the East Coast of Canada.
Transcript
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We're actually in PEI and we're in Tignish still.
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And we're lucky enough today to have Francis Morrissey with us from Royal Star Fisheries.
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I was coming in and I got to tell you, very impressive.
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And all the other, the boats and everything, they're all, help me out to understand where they are for the lobster catch.
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Well, we have, we buy lobsters from two fishing zones.
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Fishing zone 24, which is April, May, June fishery.
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And then we have boats that fish in Area 25. That starts on August the 10th.
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Then we do buy in other provinces and in Southwest Nova in the winter fishery.
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Right. How does it get shipped out of here on boats?
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No, no. If it's live, it goes in refrigerated trucking to the airports in Halifax, Moncton,
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Toronto, Montreal, or down into New York or Boston. If it's frozen, 99% of the frozen
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stuff goes to Halifax and sea containers, frozen sea containers. We don't ship live
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lobsters in the in sea containers they are all flown on flights with air freight wow how much
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are we talking friends a lot a lot like millions of pounds wow well you can tell the size of the
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plant right yeah the size of the plant just unbelievable so help me out here because you
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know how did you how did you get into this yeah you grew up here i grew up here i started fishing
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in 1982 and I was after so many years I went on the board of directors of the company and
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I was on the board of directors for 20 some years and then they asked me, they had some
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changes in management, they asked me would I look after it for a bit because I had a
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lot of experience from being on the board and stuff and I said I'd give it a try for six months
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and six months has become 16 years. Oh good for you wow and this is a co-op right? It's a cooperative
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it's owned 100% by the fishers and the way it's set up each fisher has one share in the company
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and to have a share you have to have a license to fish some species of seafood to be a member
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of the guac. Okay. And the members are accepted under the terms the first year you're on probation
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so if you're experienced as a new fisher the first year you like it and the company has no
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problem is nothing then there you're if you want to join and become a full member then they will
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the board of directors decides how many they take each year oh okay so how did it get set up so the
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corp just it was set up but we're 101 years old oh wow this year okay it was set up 101 years ago
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by a bunch of local fishers and a local lawyer and his name was Chester McCarty and they formed a
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group that was going to sell their lobsters to the co-op and to process them and stuff like that.
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They didn't have an easy starting. The reading of it is very interesting of how the struggles
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that they went through when they formed the company. Oh I'm sure. But then it continued to
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operate and there was lots of years it had rough rough times and good times but it survived 101
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years yeah what a business model and like one time it was a major major employer in the community
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because every family had between nine and 16 kids today it's still a major employer but a lot of the
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workforce now is has came here from other countries mostly the philippines but a lot of our workers
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have became Canadian citizens holding Canadian passports that have come here and some of them
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are here now for I think 14 years. And a huge amount of our workforce are permanent residents
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on the way to becoming Canadian citizens. The way I look, some people will call them temporary
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foreign workers, I don't. I think it's degrading to call a person a temporary foreign worker,
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they're employees of your company. We're very lucky that we have a large amount of them that
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have become Canadian citizens and without them we wouldn't be operating because our workforce
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in this area has dwindled substantially because basically the easiest thing that we could do when
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I grew up as a child was have a ball game because within one mile of where I grew up you had no
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problem to get 82 people basically it's around the same age to play common ball
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out in the pasture field right right today you couldn't get two because the
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families have gone down to one and two children they're no more 16 right so
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that's the difference you know it's interesting we just did a show on birth
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rates and we're trying to figure out on the show it's a three-part series which
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is very interesting just trying to figure out why there's no more why
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people aren't having kids anymore you know even in my generation i just turned 60 very frankly you
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know it was we all had three and four kids so what happened you know and we weren't having nine but
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we're still having three and four kids now we're like you mentioned we're down to one we're actually
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what in the lowest quartile uh in the world worth birth rates well in my family there was
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nine of us living and there was a couple others that passed that birth but it was common it was
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common for every household to have nine 12 15. i know house households you know in the community
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here back then they had 19 kids wow same mother same father yeah you know yeah there was the
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schools were full but like our population had dwindled badly and it's very hard in this community
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to hire male employees due to the fact that every fishing boat has tree workers aboard the fishing
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vessel so we have so many fishing vessels in this local area that it just takes up all the labor
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force right okay because they're out on the boat well they're out on the fishing boats right right
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so then you can't hire the things so that's why we had to start bringing workers in but luckily
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when we started bringing people here half of the town the lights were out because there was nobody
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living in the houses because the older people had passed on and nobody the younger people have moved
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on the few but uh right today there's no vacant houses they're all ding they've purchased houses
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and everything else yeah and what makes it bad is you get this uh this uh crap that goes on on
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social media i don't know how far i'm i'm allowed to go on this podcast or what i'm allowed to talk
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about but oh yeah it's a podcast i don't know if you're going to get in trouble because i'm not
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worried about getting in trouble no no like people got the the perception out there that these people
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that come here to work that the government is paying their wages not true the government is
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paying for their houses not true and the government is paying for everything it's not true they pay
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they when the cub it comes to bring an employee here from another country it causes this company
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about fifty six hundred dollars we got to buy an lmia from the government yeah we have to pay for
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a bunch of other paperwork and polos then we have to fly the employee here and pay all that you know
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do we pay for their housing no and when they but thing but like that's the the problem the the
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only difference i see between them and myself my ancestors came here 300 years ago they're just
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getting here. Yeah, exactly. Well, same, right? We came in, we all came, our answer.